NPR, which is my major source of news (or rather what's in the news-cycle-- I follow-up online) and probably other news sources, likes to engage in a specific sort of statistical lie-- they don't frame the numbers in the same way every time, but they frame it to sound like it's the worst all the time.

It was something that annoyed me particularly when the body counts of the Iraq war were still news-- you'd never know the US deaths were dropping, since they'd frame the number in "worst death toll in X" where X was some comparison that varied from last week to last year. Unemployment numbers get the same thing-- it certainly is trending upwards, but 8.1% isn't outrageously high. Great depression peaked at 25%*.

*I can't recall how this number works-- some people don't count the artificially-employed (WPA, CCC, etc) workers as employed, and some do.

--LAN3 Sat Mar 7 03:55:32 2009

Some people do claim that if we used the old ways of figuring unemployment, we'd have somewhat closer #s.

And no matter how you slice it, Iraq is a lot of people dead (both US and non-) and our position in the world scene altered for the worse.

It just seems weird to wonder about the alternate universe where this last boom/bust cycle had been dampened through sensible policies; what would be in the news then?